OK GenCOn ENWorlders, document your experiences here...

[Grazzt]

WotC's booth in the dealer hall was smaller this year, and it seemed like a tomb in terms of buzz, crowd, and the general sense of apathy I got from the whole thing. Looked like they reused many of the same props and setup from last year (including bangs and marks from shipping). Not sure what was going on there, but it wasn't a positive sign. No buzz to speak of regarding the DDI either. Maybe I was missing something major, but it was like they wanted to pull a jedi mind trick about that whole thing.

I noticed this too. Couple that with the fact that they were jammed in the far back corner, and also the fact that I didn't see any 4e adverts really anywhere. Seemed odd considering that this is the year of the new edition.

Now- Champions Online...jeez...those guys advertised the hell outta that game (the stairs, the columns, the floors,the walls, etc)

 

[Rel]

As has become usual for me, I spent all of about 2 hours in the dealer hall (although those two hours were quite pleasant, having been spent in the company of Bretbo and Piratecat respectively and I picked up a couple products that I think I'll enjoy). The balance of my time was spent in the Hyatt and Embassy playing and running games that were universally awesome.

And of course there were all the normal social gatherings where I got to hang with my buds from ENW and CM and considerable quantities of alcohol got consumed. Then there was the TBR of course where, as usual, NOTHING HAPPENED.

 

[Noumenon]

This con was all about exposing myself to the 4E experience. First we went to Wizards' booth and played their four-round delve to get a free mini. It was okay, but it would be a lot cooler if they would work a cross-promotion deal with one of the companies that sells realistic dungeon kits with plastic water and walls, instead of drawing little arrows on dungeon tiles to show where the water was.

Later we found the RPGA D&D Delve (totally by accident; I just asked a bored DM sitting near the fence and he explained it all to me) and went through it like five times. It was great! Figuring out all the pregens on the fly was a blast. At home you'd never generate five characters and fit them into a campaign in less than a month. Now I've played a paladin, a cleric, a warlord, and figured out how I would play a ranger and a rogue.

I noticed that the Delve is more fun when the DM stresses how fast you have to go and how much time you have left, and when he calls you by your character name instead of player name (much easier to tell who's hurt, who you go after, etc). Did anyone manage to get through the Delve? We never got out of the second room and in one case didn't even get into the second room, being bottled up in the staircase the entire time. This was due to someone's bright idea that we all delay our initiative so that we could go around the table in order. Meaning the DM moved first and we couldn't maneuver or escape the staircase.

The delve really made me wish it were possible to have professional DM services. When one DM runs one adventure twenty times for different people, they just do great at running it fast and well. It also becomes worth the investment to have appropriate minis if you are charging for it and running it multiple times.

I just wish the Delve (which someone described as "video game D&D") had gone the full video game route and allowed you to "buy back in" at the end of the 45 minutes so you could actually see the final room. Did anyone manage to finish? Even with six vets I think it would be hard to move that fast.

I also did the Paint and Take. What a great charitable event. I only wanted to paint my one mini to represent my very first D&D character, and I got to do it without buying ten different paints and having to read a bunch of internet sites to find out how to make bright colors (paint it white underneath first) and make eyes (splotch on the white, then outline over it with the skin color).

The P&T definitely could have used more signs, however. Signs like "The wait is two hours and we close at 6 PM," instead of making the poor guy at the table repeat that to 100 people over the last two hours. Also a little "how to paint" handout would be nice. Like "to correct errors, either a) get a plain wet brush and soak the paint back up or b) paint over it." Or "to make a good mouth, blend chestnut color into your flesh color."

Anyway, this Con was all about cheap or free events provided by awesome volunteers, so thanks to the RPGA and the Paint & Take people!

 

[Morrus]

I had the single worst customer service experience that I have ever had in all the years I’ve been attending cons. Wizards of the Coast booth. Early Saturday afternoon, about 2 PM-ish. I strolled up to the counter ->

------

Me: “Excuse me…”

Booth Guy: <Looks through me, doesn’t respond>

Me: “Sir?”

Booth Guy: “Sigh” (No, he literally sighed. Seriously)

Booth Guy: “Can I help you?” (spoken in a tone of voice more appropriate for saying “Bite me and die screaming, maggot fan boy.”)

Me: “Can I get a copy of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide and the DM’s Screen, please?” (trying to stay polite but inwardly taken aback)

Booth Guy: “Read my lips – SOLD. OUT. FOR. THE. CON. Got it? Next.” (spoken in loud and clipped tones, and if anything, managing even more hostility than his prior sentence)

Me: “…” (a little stunned at the level of rudeness)

Booth Guy: (noticing I’m still there) “Was I unclear, sir?”

Me: “No. Not at all. Good day.” (cold, but still polite as I walk off)

Wow. That's appalling. I would've gone nuts there and then, right in his face. Did you get his name? Was he wearing a namebadge? Failing that, hopefully someone at WotC will read this and knows who was working the booth at 2pm Saturday.

[Edit - ah, reading the remainder of your post, I see you didn't get his name. That's a shame.]

 

[Eridanis]

My GenCon experience this year was colored enhanced by the fact that I didn’t know I was going until a week beforehand. A change of employer this spring meant I had no vacation days available to use, so I was resigned to not going for the first time since 1999. But when I found out my brother had just happened to take Friday and Monday off, and my daughter was set to spend part of the weekend with my parents, and I started thinking that maybe I could leave work mid-afternoon Friday, drive the 12 hours to Indy, spend Saturday there, and come back Sunday. A few hours of planning and one thumb’s-up from the missus, and I was ready to roll!

The drive out Friday night was fun. I love to drive, and it was good to spend some one-on-one time with my brother. Unfortunately, the car he rented did not have an Aux jack, so instead of listening to an iPod full of Gamers with Jobs podcasts, we enjoyed picking up eight different baseball games on AM radio as we sped through the night in Pennsylvania and Ohio. We got in at 2:30am, sacked out for a few hours, and got down to the convention center around 8:15am to get our badges… only to find not a trace of a long line. We were in and out in five minutes. I think most people didn’t know that the registration opened at 7am, not 9am, so we were the lucky beneficiaries. Thank you, GenCon, for making it easy!

What to do with nearly two hours to kill before the dealer room opened? Well, we walked back to our car to drop off the book I didn’t need for a long line wait, and then we walked over to the new football stadium, Lucas Oil Stadium, that was having its opening ceremony that morning. A sea of blue and white, the Colts’ team colors, spilled down the steps from the camera-packed podium. I’m happy for the city of Indianapolis, but the exterior of the stadium didn’t strike me as very interesting. It led me to think about the place of public architecture in American life in the early 21st century, and how we don’t seem to make Great Buildings any more; you’d not see an impressive building like the Empire State Building any more, but you still see expressions of greatness in our public coliseums, like Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field, PNC Park, and the like. I tend to think of these places as exciting-looking, someplace that you know interesting things happen. I recall, as a boy, driving through Indianapolis on my way home from visiting my grandparents in St. Louis. I could see the RCA Dome on the Indy skyline, and say to myself, “Cool! Football games take place there!” The new stadium does not cry out as a place where interesting things happen; it mumbles something about being a converted warehouse, nothing special, and it’s just trying to blend in. Very sad for a brand new building that cost hundreds of millions of dollars! I’m sure it will be beautiful inside, with its retractable roof and side windows, but I was severely underwhelmed. Perhaps it will age well. We’ll certainly enjoy the extra space given by the demolished Dome if GenCon stays in Indy after 2010!

After mulling around, we headed back to the Con. After waiting on line to enter the dealer hall, and listening to the speech about “don’t run to the WotC booth or we’ll take away your badge,” I was disappointed to see many people running into the hall. I wish security has stood by their threat. I suggest that they have a tripwire installed for next time, so those not following directions will find themselves flat on their fac. Gamers don’t tend to have ranks in Find Traps. Hee hee.

We wandered the hall for two hours, and decamped to Steak n Shake for lunch (just in the nick of time; after sat down, the line to get in quickly grew). After lunch was Rel’s Sky Galleons of Mars game. Don’t let anyone fool you; Rel is an excellent game master and a very creative man. We had a lot of fun searching for the survivors of the RMS Titanic, lost in the polar region of Mars. I got to meet Pielorinho in person for the very first time, and saw that he’s a great gamer as well as a great guy. I was very happy to game with Kid Charlemagne again, as we’d played together in Wulf Ratbane’s Lazy Days D&D 3.5 campaign when I lived in Chicagoland. Piratecat is always a wonderful player, choosing a distinctive character voice to set the mood. Hypersmurf was in fine form, and knowing that he may not make it back to these shores again for a few years was a deciding factor in my going to this year’s GenCon. His battle cries filled the third floor of the Hyatt, and there was no denying the Gamers Were In The House. And it was good to game with my brother for the first time in years. Lots of fun all around.

The break before out next game was largely spent waiting on line at the Hyatt McDonalds. The Subway there was closed (“back in a hour – we ran out of bread.” !!!!!), so we had to make do with Big Macs and Chicken Nuggets. Meh.

The evening game was Piratecat running a Mutants and Masterminds game he’d outlined on the plane flight to Indy. As one would expect, it was fun, interesting, and full of action, comedy and drama. We spent the evening trying to figure out if the dastardly Professor Peril has truly had a change of heart, and was trying to become a Good Guy (Doctor Benjamin Factor – a.k.a. Benny Factor) or if it was just a Twisted Plot. Never having played MnM before, I had no fear, as PC is the undisputed master of making game rules transparent and letting everyone concentrate on having fun in the game. I got to meet Quartermoon, who is delightful and a great gamer. Coyote6 did a great job as Valiant, and Wizardru was a pleasure to meet and game with. I had met keryn (aka Sandie Law) before but had never had a chance to spend any time with her; for someone who was obviously tired and had to keep track of her young son (who could not have been better behaved), she more than held her own in the game, and was a lot of fun. My brother did a fine job as my character’s sidekick, with silly voice and all, and even got to be the McGuffin that drove the end of the plot. Hypersmurf stole the show though, and stunned Piratecat to silence with his plot-changing speech to the bad guy at the end of the game. Not something I’ve ever seen before, or expect to see again any time soon!

After that game wrapped up at 12:30am, it was back to our hotel room to page through new swag for a few minutes before our bodies turned off of their own volition. Sunday morning found me very groggy, but breakfast at Denny’s (alas, no Bob Evans nearby) helped perk me up a bit. We spent two more hours in the dealer hall, and would have spent more, but we had a twelve hour drive ahead of us; into the car and off on I-70 East to return to our ordinary lives. Got home around 12:45am, and now I’m at work, wondering what my name is and why I can’t go back to sleep.

I had a lot of fun, and I hope we can go again next year (all of us: wife and three kids). Time will tell!

 

[Stormtower]

GenCon was a marvelous experience for me. It was my first time DMing at GenCon (3rd GenCon overall) and I ran 7 slots of LFR (Core 1-3 Sense of Wonder in slot 1, 3, 5, and 7, plus Core 1-1 Inheritance in slot 9, 11, 13). I'm a little hoarse but otherwise it couldn't have gone any better. The LFR launch overall was extremely well received (at least, it seemed so to me) and the players were delighted to hear about player-driven guilds and adventuring companies, which is the new RPGA experiment to help change the culture from competitive into a more cooperative, shared experience. Thumbs up all around, and thanks to all my awesome players, fellow GMs and RPGA organizers.

My scanned/laminated dungeon tile maps received rave reviews by players, marshals and fellow DMs, and my status tracking system (cubes and rhinestones) was also well received by my tables. I got a really nice complement from Bruce Cordell of WotC on Sunday morning on my DM style, which really made my year. *blush* That made all the prep worth it, and then some.

Special thanks to the "Ice Pirate Lords" in Slot 13 on Sunday morning... if any of you are ENWorlders, that table rocked the house. Great RP, great tactics, just one of those totally in-the-zone experiences where all 6 players and myself were completely sucked into the narrative and the combats.

I agree with others who said the dealers' hall was somewhat lacklustre this year. Paizo was kickin' it with long lines and strong sales, smiles all around. The mood at the WotC booth was a bit somber, too... but that is understandable.

I will be coming back next year to run 7 or 8 more slots. Viva la GenCon!

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

I got to:

• Try to conquer the galaxy and fail (Twilight Imperium)
• Shoot down a plane and in turn have mine shot out from under me by having the front half of the plane chewed away (Crimson Skies)
• defeat Darth Lucas and help create Chewthreepio, Wookiee/Cyborg with a Dewback body and light-saber horn. (SWSE)
• Return to a forgotten Earth and get caught between two warring post-apoc factions only to die in a firefight at the last second (Dread)
• Help other Hanna Barberra characters thwart a cross-dimensional attack by Elmer Fudd (Feng Shui)
• Escape from a luxury spaceliner that had become infested with borg-like creatures (d20 Modern)
• watch as my lovely and misunderstood Winter Wtich was defeated once again (4e)
• Get blown up by dynamite while taking out zombie banditos (AFMBE)
• Be a Lara Croft-esque adventurer fighting Nazi's on Jupiter (Spirit of the Century)
• Fight the evil Clown Martians and rescue the survivors of the skyship RMS Titanic. (Sky Galleons of Mars -- d20 Modern)
• Sit behind the curtain at the ENnies and run the slideshow
• Attend the annual opening night CM/ENW party as well as SammichCon '08.
• Average 4 hours of sleep a day.
• Hang out with a heck of a lot of wonderful friends I get to see all too seldom.

 

[Noumenon]

My customer service experience at the WotC booth was that I told them "You should tell people who enjoyed your delve about the Delve upstairs, yours really whets the appetite for more" and he said, "Okay, I'll pass that on" and made it sound like it might be a good idea. So it was fine.

 

[Steel_Wind]

GenCon 2008 Auction Hall

One of the centrepiece events of any Gencon is the world’s largest game auction hall. The importance of this event to Gencon has arguably declined over the past ten years with the rise of eBay. At the same time, however, as the price level in the dealer room for new product has climbed, the real bargains at Gencon can only be found in the auction hall. I tend to spend a fair bit of time in the auction hall as a consequence.

This year, I spent more time in the auction hall than I do normally due to the conflicting schedules of most of the people I attended Gencon with. The end result is that I can give a pretty coherent report on what sold and for how much concerning several thousand items that went this year.

The entertainment value of the Auction, especially when Frank Mentzer is the auctioneer, is hard to beat if you are a hardcore gamer. Frank was entertaining as always, though he was a little subdued on his first night up when he started to mention Gary’s death. For gamers, EGG was an icon of our youth and the death of the Father of the Game that saddened us all. For Frank, Gary was much more: a close friend of 40+ years. He choked up and had to wipe away the tears. It was a bittersweet start to the collectible auction.

Generally speaking...

Original and 1st ed Collectible RPG Products: Prices remain stable to climbing for early D&D rpg products in “excellent” or better shape. Prices for 70’s and early 80s era products still in the shrink are insanely high, even with respect to fairly trivial TSR products. That said, a copy of the First edition Original D&D Brown box version, third printing, with an incomplete and heavily damaged box with books in, at best, “good to very good” shape went for $850 this year. If the product had been in excellent shape – it would easily have gone for five to ten times that amount.

Products signed by Gary are climbing in value, for obvious reasons. ‘Nuff said.

2E products: Prices are still relatively low here, except for a few gems. Overall, I thought the 2E era games were fewer in number for sale, and the prices were, if anything down.

3E products: There is no auction market for 3E era items yet. Wait another ten years please

Collectible Auction Highlights: Most of the serious money was extracted on Friday night. An excellent to near mint copy of Quest for the Fazzlewood went for only $750. It was in impressively good shape, and the price was light in view of previous sales. Lost Caverns of Tsojconth (not a typo) went for a lot more as I recall $1300 I think. I missed the sale price on Palace of the Vampire Queen (the first ever D&D module) which sold on Saturday night around 1:00 a.m..

An excellent B3 went for $1100. A “little light” to borrow a phrase from Frank Mentzer.

The stuff that absolutely blew me away was the price for 1st edition Dungeon Geomorphs, in the shrink. I remember buying and opening the products from these lines. If I had known that I could have picked up a second copy of each and stored ‘em for 27 years or so to get $350-$450 each for them...well...I would have bought a few more!

A copy of Bladerunner – the Boardgame in mint condition went for $850. In light of the rarity of the product (100 made, given as a promo at premiere of movie), I think that one was the steal of the auction. The game really did look like it had been stored in a suitcase full of pillows for 25 years. It was the heart and soul of “mint condition”. I can easily see how 25 years from now, that item could go for $20,000.00+ if it is stored in the same manner it has been for the past 25 years.

Other auction notes: The high water mark for Talisman was evidently set last year. With the release of the 4th edition by Black Industries last Gencon and the forthcoming re-release (a “5th Ed”) by FFG (with plastic figures) set for later this year, it’s time to sell your GW Talisman stuff on eBay while you can. Prices were down significantly from last year. Don’t get me wrong – they are still expensive as hell – but the downright nutty prices of $300 plus were nowhere in sight. A player’s copy of Talisman 3rd Ed in fair to good shape went for $80. Last year? That went for $225.

Auction Gripe: The length of the charity auction on Saturday night pushed my limits of patience. Two hours is one thing - four is another entirely. This format of the charity auction needs to be rethought.

My steal of the Auction: I got a copy of Eagle Games’ Age of Mythololgy, in the shrink, for $38. I was happy. I have not opened it yet – but yes, I plan to open it and play it. I prefer to play my games, thanks.

 

[Jack99]

Wow. That's appalling. I would've gone nuts there and then, right in his face. Did you get his name? Was he wearing a namebadge? Failing that, hopefully someone at WotC will read this and knows who was working the booth at 2pm Saturday.

[Edit - ah, reading the remainder of your post, I see you didn't get his name. That's a shame.]

Three words that works with people like that: "Your superior, now!"